FMP: Week 20 Thursday

On Thursday I changed all of my lighting to dynamic, since as a whole the scene has a lot of interactive and dynamic elements that will need it to be as such, and I could afford to do so with such a small scene. I also made sure to ask Kat in a feedback session if it was ok to do so before implementing it.

After that, I moved onto making some splashes for the water, as I realised I had an effect for moving around in it, but not for jumping in. Originally, I had planned to take a crack at making a mesh particle effect in houdini, but I ended up rejecting that idea after realising I could get an incredibly similar effect with a much cheaper method: layering textures. I loosely followed the idea of this tutorial, but added my own twist on it:

Using a noise map to create a squiggly line in a circle mask, then adding perlin noise to add areas that could be eroded by the value step, which is controlled by the particle opacity. Originally, paired this with a normal map of the same noise pattern, but then realised that I didn't need it since the material would be a flat, unlit colour like all of the other water effects.

Particle effect using velocity and acceleration to create a force and gravity effect for the droplets. I duplicated the emitter so that the layers would give it more depth and added random rotation to create variety.

Cheaper than a mesh particle with the bonus of matching the rest of the water :D

I simply plugged it into the already existing water blueprint here:

I had a convenient Z velocity pin open, so I checked to see if the character had a z velocity lower than 0, and if so the fake tick would generate the splash particle every 0.1 seconds. The sequence after generating a splash was plugged into a delay node of 0.1 seconds before reseting the DoOnce node to add a delay to the emitter without stockpiling them on the fake tick. It then fed up to the flip flop node alternating between ripple sounds for added audio effect. By doing this, I had a splash particle that could also serve as a kind of skipping stone effect if the player skimmed the top of the water.